An Alphabet of Better Writing # K

K is for....Keen

Keenness is a brilliant quality for a writer to have, keenness in all its manifestations and meanings.  My trusty Pocket Oxford  defines it as eager and ardent, and if you are not eager to write and ardent about your subject matter then you will face an uphill struggle in your writing life. 

The dictionary also defines keen as acute and highly perceptive - and intuitive perception about the way the world works and people's behaviour in it is an absolute necessity if you want to succeed as an author.  If you aren't already, you need to train yourself to be observant and to develop a spontaneous interest in people: look and learn, look and learn, as Margaret Atwood says, it's all material.
 
Other definitions include penetrating and vivid and if either of these appeared in a review of your work, wouldn't you  be over the moon?  If you can bring penetrating insight to bear on your story, your narrative will be more vivid and this in turn will engage your reader more intensely -- you need to create the right environment for them to fall in love with your book -- in other words you want them to be as keen on it as you are.

Keen also has funereal overtones and as a writer, you may find yourself bewailing things from time to time: it is hard to come to the end of a piece of work when you had invested so much in it; harder still to send it out into the world and face the gamut of puzzling and confounding and -  sometimes - joyous responses to it. So if you are keen in all the other senses of the word, be prepared to keen occasionally as well...

(A bookshop in the French book town of Cuisery that I was pretty keen on...)

An Alphabet of Better Writing # J

J is for...Jeopardy

A writing friend of mine told me that whenever she submitted work, her editor always asked her, "Where's the jeopardy, where's the jeopardy?" and it is a legitimate -- not to say crucial - question. My trusty old Pocket Oxford Dictionary (thank you, Dad) defines jeopardy as danger, especially of severe harm, and good fiction usually reeks of it.

Most obviously, at some point in the story your protagonist needs to be put in jeopardy, as this is the best way of ratcheting up the tension and making your reader care even more intensely about their ultimate well-being. However, the danger doesn't necessarily need to be of physical harm, unless you are writing a thriller.  The threat could just as easily be of mental or emotional damage, or something that your hero or heroine cares about passionately may be put at risk.  This could be a relationship, a piece of valued property, a career break, the family home - whatever you hit upon, make sure that the stakes are high.  Unless you potentially disrupt the world order you have carefully created within your story, there will be no jeopardy and without jeopardy there is no crackle, no excitement, no frisoon to your work.

Another source of jeopardy which you might like to consider is in the subject matter you choose to write about, or the way you choose to tell your story.  Something controversial will always make the hair stand up on the back of your reader's neck.  Think Nicholson Baker.  Think Brett Easton Ellis.  Live dangerously.

An Alphabet of Better Writing # I

I is for....Interior Landscape

There's a whole world inside a person's head -- John Keats conjures it up as a mansion with many apartments, but I prefer to think of it more as a landscape, an interior landscape. I like the impression of limitless space which this suggests, and the fact that a landscape can be worked upon and changed by light and weather, just as experience shapes the inner self.

It is relatively easy to bring the externals of your character to life -- you can describe how they look, how they dress, how they speak.  You can allude to their past and make sure that other players in the story have plenty to say about them too, so that you provide a number of different opinions about them, all of which will help to flesh out a generous picture.

The heart of the matter, the kernel of your hero or heroine, lies beyond the reach of other people, however.  Only you as the author have access, and conveying the inner life, the private thoughts, the guilty secrets, the reluctant truths - all the tricky, personal things we prefer not to share with anyone else - should be at the centre of your craft. Without a rich interior landscape to contrast with all the exterior facets, your protagonist will only exist in two dimensions; to bring them fully to life you need to go upcountry and into the interior.

An Alphabet of Better Writing # H

H is for...Heartfelt

William Wordsworth once said, "Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart," and I think he was on to something.  The best writing comes fresh and unmediated from the core of you, from your heart, if you like.  Sometimes it can feel as if you are writing without thinking, the process is so intense and immediate; the crafting, which involves editing, revising and honing, comes later in a different phase of creativity.

So, in order to write well, trust your first instinct -- that touchstone moment -- and try not to let anything (phone calls, emails or any other kind of displacement activity) get in the way. However, heartfelt writing does not just consist of this first rush of pure thought.  It has elements of emotional intensity -- it comes from your heart, after all, and sincerity -- it must be felt and meant. If you can put yourself in a frame of mind where the words, imbued with emotion and sincerity, flow, then your work will attain that holy grail of writing: authenticity, and in doing all this you will have found - ta da! - your voice.

To achieve all this -- and I'm not saying it's easy -- you need private space: the kitchen table will do, if there is no one else around.  You need peace and quiet.  You need to concentrate intently.  Most important of all you need lots and lots of practice -- try writing one page a day, it doesn't matter what it is, just sit and write and see what comes out. Don't think too much about it, it's a mystical process, and at times a magical one as well.

In the meantime here's another door and a different kind of writing from the heart...

An Alphabet of Better Writing - # G

G is for Genesis...

I have found it incredibly helpful to have a little Book of Genesis running alongside the actual book I'm writing.  I don't formulate a strict plotline in advance, but I do make regular, detailed notes in my writing journal, I stick photos in, and copies of the feedback from my agent - anything and absolutely everything that has contributed to the creative process. I do this partly so that I don't forget any thoughts or ideas, but also to help me keep track of the gestation (I guess G is also for Gestation) of the story. This way I can monitor where I'm going and also make sense of where I've been.  It's incredibly precious to me, almost as precious as the manuscript itself, and while I let friends and family see various drafts of my novel, my journal is utterly private.

How do you keep track of your writing life??

An Alphabet of Better Writing - # F

F is for...First Person

Should writing in the first person be your first port of call? All of us experience life in the first person -- obviously -- so in many ways the logical point from which to tell a story should be just that, the first person, or "I".

You'd think so, wouldn't you?  But it isn't quite as easy as that. There a few pitfalls associated with going down this route -- mainly that it is easy to sound gauche.  I think often people assume that the intimacy afforded by writing as "I" can be a substitute for fully realised characterisation.  You need to inhabit every nook and cranny of the character you are creating; your chief tools for bringing them to life will be their thoughts and actions and words, everything has to originate from the character themselves.  You won't be able to view them from the outside, so will be denied useful additions such as what other people think about them (unless this is conveyed to them in speech). This means you have to work harder and in a more concentrated way.

Not only is it easy to skimp on characterisation, assuming that just by using the first person it is automatically done for you, there are structural challenges to contend with too. An omniscient narrator telling the story from the point of view of "he" or "she" can describe events from any point of view, flitting from hero to heroine to bit part player, so that each one has their moment in the spotlight and the plot can be related in a flexible and  varied way.  The first person narrative doesn't have that luxury, you are confined to a single viewpoint.  This can raise all sorts of issues - how does your heroine describe something unless she is there when it happens,  or it is described to her, (but here you risk losing immediacy). There may be moments in the plot which actively demand that she isn't present - then what?

The first person is (weirdly) both liberating and constraining to use.  If you are writing a character-based, reflective book, then the opportunity to go ever deeper into somebody's psyche is probably hard to resist.  If you are writing a pacy action thriller, then you might find that the flexibility of the third person is easier to handle.  Either way, don't underestimate the difficulty of writing as "I" - it isn't a short cut to anywhere at all, if anything it makes you go the long way round.

I haven't shared a door with you for ages, so here's a particularly beautiful one to make up for it ...

Betrayal - The Best Thing That Can Happen on a Saturday Afternoon

I know that in my Alphabet of Better Writing I should be tackling the letter F, but I keep getting sidetracked by literary lessons that can be learnt elsewhere.

To whit - on Saturday afternoon I listened to Betrayal by Harold Pinter, dramatised on BBC Radio 4 - if you didn't hear it, reach for the I-Player button here. Last year I saw the London production with Kristin Scott Thomas, Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles, but in fact I was infinitely more gripped by this radio version. The play comes across as a chamber piece which the medium of radio compresses and intensifies.  The setting was minimal -- the sounds of crockery and cutlery in a restaurant provide a slight yet glacial orchestration to the action.  With no visuals to divert the listener, the voices of the actors, speaking Pinter's pared and meticulous prose, chart the casual repression of intimacy, revealing how practical and brutal dismantling a relationship can be.

The play is a beautifully constructed triangle, exploring the complications of friendship between Robert and Jerry: Robert is married to Emma, with whom Jerry has had a seven-year affair.  The action begins two years after the affair has finished and reaches back into the past, year by year, articulating the longing for what has been lost.  Betrayal begins at the end and ends at the beginning, anatomising the journey  from disillusionment and unhappiness to the first, guilty flair of desire.

Given how self-preoccupied the characters are, it's amazing that any of them manages to form relationships at all.  The key issue that exercises them is not what happens between Emma and Jerry, but who knew what was happening and when they knew it.  Ownership of knowledge is power and remaining in ignorance (however blissful) is by definition ignominious.

Andrew Scott as Jerry,  and Olivia Coleman as Emma perfectly capture the necessary narcissism of lovers and Charles Edwards' Robert colludes in the affair, undermining his friendship with Jerry by failing to reveal that he is aware of what's going on.

I listened, rapt,  for seventy-five minutes; the performances perfectly pitched and the suffering of the three characters no less acute for being stifled.

Literary Lessons to Be Learnt:

• When you are structuring your work, be bold.  Try not to go the obvious route from A to B, experiment with a more lateral approach.  Use form to put pressure on content - you'll be amazed at what effect this can have.
• Make sure that your narrative and the themes which underpin it are well integrated.  Every phrase in Pinter's Betrayal is inflected with deceit and perfidy, with the result that listening to the play becomes a more concentrated and intense experience.
• Provide your readers with enough materiel to do the emotional work for themselves.  The scene in which Emma tells Jerry she is pregnant by her husband is almost unbearably painful, in spite of the fact that practically none of the pain is actually articulated.

Real Life in Rural France - or in the Literary Margins

Found wifi - briefly - so here's a quick update. A slight deviation from my Alphabet of Better Writing, but there might be a literary lesson here in any case.

We're moored up in Orconte - it's not a back water, it's the tributary to some back water, and there's a junkie smoking crack in the toilet block and the man on the boat tied up behind us has said that he'll shoot him with his gun if he becomes aggressive. So that's alright then.

In fiction, as in real life, there are often absurd, sad dramas being played out in the margins of the main story. There's something faintly Chekovian about the situation here, which I'm sure will resolve itself with something more like a whimper than a bang, at least I hope it will, and the poor lad will keep searching for relief /release and the man on the next boat will enjoy an afternoon with his grandchildren that doesn't involve live target practice, and we will weigh anchor and continue our journey through the flat, agro-industrial landscape of the Haute Marne. But when you are writing, remember there's scope at the edges of your work for comic vignettes or tragic scenes, or sometimes a downbeat mix of both. Medieval stone masons and carpenters knew this well: every great cathedral has its hidden caricature carved beneath a choir stall or at the top of a pillar. It's the chance discovery of something revelatory in an unexpected place which is beguilingly appealing.


In the meantime, if you don't hear from me...

An Alphabet of Better Writing # E

E is for Exit...

I'm back in the wilds of Burgundy, or the Haute Marne to be precise, where electricity is pretty hard to come by on the impenetrably green river banks (it's available for one hour in the morning, one hour at noon and one in the evening, if you're very, very lucky) and wifi is virtually unheard of, so forgive me if posts are sporadic at the moment.

Reading and reading and reading - total immersion in writers I know (Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary) and - oh joy - writers who are completely new to me. I've been bowled over by Margaret Leroy's unassuming but enormous talent, her writing flows and eddies like water (I'm in canal mode at the moment as you see), so rush out and buy The Collaborator if you can. I've also plunged into The Song of Achilles, this year's Orange prize winner by Madeline Miller, which is well-researched and lyrical and intuitive and delightful. Now I've re-surfaced I'm reading Alastair Horne's gripping history of the Paris Commune and life feels rich in all kinds of pleasure.

Exit only temporary, normal service will resume...